Wednesday, 30 September 2015

An Afghan girl sheds a tear upon her arrival with other refugees and
migrants to the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea
from Turkey on Tuesday: photo by Aris Messinis/AFP, 29 September 2015

This is the only chance we are ever going to have

to be here. Finding traces of liquid water once flowing on the red planet

is a way of forgetting that there's not much time left

for the long awaited benefits of progress

to finally kick in where we are. I'm still a little unclear on that concept says radio

lady who's now quoting Pope, the. And there went the End

of Days again. A White Moon appeared to Kim above the cabins

but she don't care. Have we moved to an earlier chapter, when in Big Smoky Valley

the nights of the infinitely small figures in the picture

which has fallen over on the mantle during every almost imperceptible tremor

rippling away from the test range, and is held together by some kind of tape,

grow longer now, touched by mists and a light

rain has begun to fall. That gal don't know one thing. One tear

shed here on ancient desiccated Earth in this moment means more to tiny me

than a rocking briny lake last week or a million years ago on Mars.

Scientists find first evidence that briny water flowed on the surface of #Mars: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 28 September 2015

Cairo taken from an airplane on Wednesday shows a section of the Egyptian capital of Cairo and the Nile River: photo by Khaled Desouki/AFP, 30 September 2015

A migrant child leans out of a train window for food at a station in Tovarnik: image via Reuters Top News @Reuters, 29 September 2015

Turbulence

An Israeli policeman prevents a Palestinian man from entering the
compound which houses al-Aqsa mosque, known by Muslims as the Noble
Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City: photo by Ammar Awad/Reuters, 29 September 2015

Turkish tourists are seen trying to take shelter during clashes
between Palestinians protesters and Israeli police near the entrance of
al-Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalems old city on Monday: photo by Ahmad Gharabli/AFP, 29 September 2015

Palestinian protesters throw stones at Israeli troops during clashes
over tension in Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque, in the occupied West Bank
city of Hebron on Tuesday: photo by Mussa Qawasma/Reuters, 29 September 2015

Waves in the Xindian river after Typhoon
Dujuan passed in New Taipei City on Tuesday. Super typhoon Dujuan
killed two and left more than 300 injured in Taiwan before making
landfall in China: photo by Sam Yeh/AFP, 29 September 2015

A paramilitary policeman holds onto a fence as tourists dodge tidal
waves increased under the influence of Typhoon Dujuan, at the bank of
Qiantang river, in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province: photo by Reuters, 30 September 2015

Kafka's
shame, then, is no more personal than the life and thought which
govern it and which he has described thus: "He does not live for the
sake of his own life, he does not think for the sake of his own
thought. He feels as though he were living and thinking under the
constraint of a family. . . . Because of this unknown family . . . he
cannot be released." We do not know the make-up of this unknown family,
which is composed of human beings and animals. But this much is clear:
it is this family that forces Kafka to move cosmic ages in his
writings. Doing this family's bidding, he moves the mass of historical
happenings as Sisyphus rolled the stone. As he does so, its nether side
comes to light; it is not a pleasant sight, but Kafka is capable of
bearing it. "To believe in progress is not to believe that progress has
taken place. That would be no belief." Kafka did not consider the age
in which he lived as an advance over the beginnings of time. His novels
are set in a swamp world. In his works, created things appear at the
stage which Bachofen has termed the hetairic stage. The fact that it is
now forgotten does not mean that it does not extend into the present.
On the contrary, it is actual by virtue of this very oblivion.

Walter Benjamin: excerpt from Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death, from Jüdische Rundschau, 1934, translated by Harry Zohn in Illuminations, 1968

Theodor Adorno on the Concept of Progress:"it promises an answer to the doubt and
the hope that things will finally get better, that people will at last
be able to breathe a sigh of relief"

Antique cars and trucks along the roadside, Montana: photo by Carol M. Highsmith, 29 September 2005 (Library of Congress)

For
a theoretical account of the category of progress it is necessary to
scrutinize the category so closely that it loses its semblance of
obviousness, both in its positive and its negative usage. And yet such
proximity also makes the account more difficult.
Even more than other concepts, the concept of progress dissolves upon
attempts to specify its exact meaning, for instance what progresses and
what does not. Whoever wants to define the concept precisely easily
destroys what he is aiming at. The subaltern prudence that refuses to
speak of progress before it can distinguish progress in what, of what,
and in relation to what, displaces the unity of the moments, which
within the concept ritually elaborate each other, into a mere
juxtaposition. By insisting on exactitude where the impossibility of the
unambiguous appertains to the subject matter itself, dogmatic
epistemology misses its object, sabotages insight and helps to
perpetuate the bad by zealously forbidding reflection upon what, in the
age of both utopian and absolutely destructive possibilities, the
consciousness of those entangled would like to discover: whether there
is progress. Like every philosophical term, 'progress' has its
equivocations; and as in any such term, these equivocations also
register a commonality. What at this time one should understand by
'progress' one knows vaguely, but precisely: for just this reason one
cannot employ the concept roughly enough. To use the term pedantically
merely cheats it out of what it promises: an answer to the doubt and
the hope that things will finally get better, that people will at last
be able to breathe a sigh of relief. For this reason alone one cannot
say precisely what progress should mean to people, because the crisis
of the situation is that precisely while everyone feels the crisis, the
words bringing resolution are missing. Only those reflections about
progress have truth that immerse themselves in progress and yet
maintain distance, withdrawing from paralyzing facts and specialized
meanings. Today reflections of this kind come to a point in the
contemplation of whether humanity is capable of preventing catastrophe.
The forms of humanity's own global societal constitution threaten its
life, if a self-conscious global subject does not develop and
intervene.

Now they're saying the Pope thought she was Miley Cyrus. But that can't be.

It's hard to know what to believe or who to trust any more, amid the continuous bewildering clashing and banging sideways progress toward oblivion (or next week) of the always growing number of interested civilizations.